Yosma, 50 Baker Street, London W1U 7BT (020 3019 6282).
Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80

Through no fault of its own, Yosma may well have to fight the inverse snobbery of Londoners. We know where to go for good, cheap Turkish food; for rough-edged dishes prepared by stocky men with moustaches who cook sitting down, hunched over the smoking mangal grill like this is the only thing they’ve ever done. We go to Green Lanes in far north London. That’s the heart of the Turkish community, ergo that’s where the good stuff is. It’s the food of the scuffed inner suburbs, never the centre.

And then along comes Yosma, with its artfully pointed ceramic tiled walls – oh, that messy grouting – and its modishly open kitchen complete with a Josper grill. It has a shiny view of Baker Street, complete with an upmarket shopping centre across the road. And yet it claims to be a mangal just like the ones up on Green Lanes. Surely it can’t be any good. Or surely, if it’s any good it’s going to be too expensive. Because, y’know, Baker Street! Nothing real ever happened on Baker Street. It’s only famous for being the fictitious home of a fictional character. It’s not about real. It’s about money.

True, Yosma is more expensive than some of the Turkish cafés of Green Lanes, but not by very much. At Yosma the non-meat mezze are £4 to £6, with meaty dishes tipping towards £8. Most charcoal grills are £10 or £11, which compares favourably with a Haringey stalwart such as Gökyüzü.

I’ve written before about my love for this food, explored during repeated summer trips to Turkey: about my pilgrimages to the basic canteens by the bus station in Fethiye, where overpowered air conditioning belches vapour and it’s so cheap it feels like they’re paying you to bury your face in plates of perfect lamb doner; about nights lost tending the DIY barbecues of Cinbal restaurant just outside the ghost village of Kayaköy, where smoke rises towards the vine-clad open roof and the air smells of rendering lamb fat. Turkish food at its best has an uncommon zest and vibrancy. It’s a culinary tradition built around making ingredients taste most of themselves.

Yosma is a far better than average expression of it. Haydari, here made with a thick strained yogurt, bashed through with handfuls of garlic and mint, dill and crushed walnuts is less a slippery dip than something you excavate. Acili ezme, a tomato-based dip, is full of chilli heat which comes in slowly after the sweetness of the ripened fruit. Pickles, purple with the stain of sumac, have serious crunch and citrus kick. The only complaint is that these plates cry out for still-warm flatbreads, ballooned up from expanding air inside and crisp shelled. You need something for tearing and mopping and wiping. The thick slabs of crusty loaf, dribbled with olive oil and dried herbs, are fine as far as they go, but they’re just not especially well engineered for the job. At £2 for two pieces, they also feel like the one outbreak of poor value.

Still, we move on. For £8 there are two small red mullet, lightly battered and deep fried until you can crunch all the way from the fragile gossamer tail, through the pearly flesh, to the end of the head. Put down that knife and fork. Use your fingers to break it apart, until your thumbs are coated in rich, fishy oils.

In a culinary culture that steers clear of the pig, beef makes a good stand-in, first in a grilled sausage, served hot off the grill and sultry with cumin. It turns up again in Antakya dürüm, described in the section headed “clay oven” as a minced beef köfte kebab, but rather daintier than that for being encased in cylinders of flaky pastry into which the oils have begun to run. There is a welcome smear of yogurt to cool it all down, and a bright onion salad flaunting more of sumac’s purple flash.

The most controversial dish we try comes from the list headed “mangal”. It stars lamb breast, the latest once-cheap cut to be rediscovered. (Quick aside: why do pigs have bellies and lambs have breasts? It’s the same cut. Answers please.) It’s a fatty meat with lots of connective tissue which requires a long, old spanking in the oven to come to its best. At that best, however, it is a marvellous thing: all threads of collapsing meat, highly flavoured oils and a crisp skin. It’s one of those items I am always drawn to order.

Here, though, the meat appears to have been long-braised until it’s falling apart, then formed into a loaf and wrapped in caul fat before finally being finished on the grill. There is the textural pleasure of the seared “skin” breaking and the folds of the offal-like meat inside. I would be lying if I did not admit to being slightly disappointed that it was not what I had imagined, but it’s an impressive piece of work for all that.

Stay for dessert. Hell, come here just for dessert. The cheesecake
reads like the stuff of nightmares. It’s flavoured with Turkish delight and rosewater, which makes it sound less like a sweet thing than a trip round the perfume counter at Selfridges. Make sure to order it; if you don’t, you’re dead to me. The key here is both an exceptionally light hand on the floral ingredients and a light cream filling which is not embarrassed of its cheesy antecedents. Too often cheesecake tastes like sweetened, over-thickened cream. This has far more going on. Fermentation has occurred. A sour cherry sauce finishes the plate.

And if you’re having that you might as well have the künefe, a glorious syrup-soaked pastry with a golden glazed dome of shredded filo, baked in a silvery dish. It’s beautiful to look at, even better to eat, the layers of crunchy and soft luring you in to finish the whole damn thing, regardless of whether you think that a good idea. It’s a lot of dessert for £7. At the end we drink thimbles of hot, sweet Turkish coffee with the thickness of Brent Crude, and give thanks for our good fortune.

There’s a concise list of Turkish wines, which are worth investigating, and a raki selection, plus cocktails made from same. Naturally there’s also gassy Efes beer, which always did the job on a hot evening by the Dalaman coast. It’s the flavour of an old friend. Which given time, is what Yosma may well become to me, too, when I find myself in need of a Turkish fix.

Jay’s news bites

■ There are so many great north London Turkish restaurants that choosing one to spotlight is tricky, but I’ve gone for Mangal 2 on Stoke Newington Road. (There are other Mangals with other digits.) All the grills are present and correct and you might just get a sighting of Gilbert and George, who apparently have eaten in one of the Mangals every night for 28 years.

■ What the world needs now is more food-based comedy. Give thanks then for self-styled anarchist cook George Egg, who has put together The Mess, a night at London’s Foundling Museum this Wednesday. Performers include food writer Tim Hayward and Glaswegian raconteur Rachel McCormack. Tickets are £15 (foundling museum.org.uk).

■ American food writer Colman Andrews, who chronicled the cooking of Catalonia, has turned his attentions to the UK with The British Table, a thumping great volume subtitled: ‘A New Look at the Traditional Cooking of England, Scotland and Wales’. It even includes a recipe for Middlesbrough’s finest, the parmo.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1